Berkeley is her first attempt at cooking for the masses-at making private-school lunches on a public-school budget-but she is hardly alone anymore. America is suddenly full of people who want to save school lunch: celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver, who exposed the sorry state of British cafeterias two years ago and has threatened to do the same in N ew York; guerrilla documentarians like Morgan Spurlock, who championed healthful lunches in "Super Size Me"; and a swell- ing horde of angry parents, crusading caf- eteria directors, and politicians with bitter lunchroom memories of their own. Last year, more than two hundred bills in forty states sought to ban sodas and junk food from schools, and in May the major bev- erage companies voluntarily agreed to re- move non-diet drinks by the fall of 2009. Bill Clinton, whose foundation helped broker the deal, called it "courageous." Still, expelling junk food won't do much to improve school cafeterias. In East Hampton, Cooper had twenty-seven em- ployees for five hundred diners; in Berke- ley, she has fifty-three for four thousand. In East Hampton, Cooper spent about twelve dollars per day, per child on break- fast and lunch. In Berkeley, she spends three and a half dollars for the same two meals. Can a decent lunch be made for so little? And, if so, will anyone eat it? T he Central Kitchen of the Berkeley Unified School District lies on a quiet side street in northwest Berkeley not far from the city's foothills. It was built in the nineteen -fifties, as part of Jefferson Elementary School, and has survived periodic upheavals from deseg- regation, bilingual education, No Child Left Behind, and the Lorna Prieta earth- quake. The kitchen occupies a dingy, high-ceilinged room. It smells of stale bread and disinfectant, and is populated by hulking industrial machines: a steam kettle, a sautéing vat, a pair of convection ovens, and a Hobart mixer with a vaguely menacing air, like the hooded mother beast in "Aliens." There is no blender, no food processor, no stovetop or grill, yet the kitchen produces food for thirteen of the city's sixteen schools, including all eleven of its elementary schools. (The z other schools have their own kitchens, which Cooper also oversees.) g On a Tuesday morning in May, the 9 menu called for meat loaf-four thou- sand servings of it, with mashed potatoes and oven-roasted squash. In the kitchen's walk-in refrigerator, thirty cylinders of government-supplied ground beef, each two feet long, five inches in diameter, and ten pounds in weight, awaited Cooper's attention. She heaved two of them onto her shoulders and dropped them on a butcher-block counter. "Now you can see '\ :- ,, .,- ers was scooping chicken and noodles into take-out trays. The group was led by Cecelia Adams, the kitchen manager, a middle-aged black woman with a deep, easy voice and an unflappable manner. Because the other schools lacked proper kitchens, the food had to be prepared well in advance. The chicken had been made on Monday for Wednesdays lunch; the y P' ' A ", \' \ " \ \, i\ ,,\,' 1.,\ " " { , z } , .' '\ " , " .; - - .. . . . -. Malcolm X elementary school in Berkeley, Califòrnia. Photograph by Thomas Kern. why I lift weights," she said, then took a swig from a protein shake. She'd had braces put on her teeth in January to fend off gum disease, and this was the only breakfast that wouldn't stick to them. "It's a chef's worst nightmare," she said. Cooper had been up since three-thirty, and cooking since five. She lives alone in a rented house in Moss Beach, an hour's drive to the south, and commutes to Berkeley every day before dawn. Her crew is usually there when she arrives. The assistant chef, Alan Lyman, an ami- able Englishman with the shape and blush of a Bardett pear, was making a tub of coleslaw. He had spent ten years cook- ing in British hospitals and twelve in the Berkeley schools, but he was still getting used to Cooper's pace. Across from him, a team of eight black and Hispanic work- meat loaf would be served on Thursday; and a truck outside was unloading Fri- day's lunch-tamales and enchiladas made by a local company. Cooper had met the owners at a stand at a farmers' market. "Do you think you could make four thousand of these a week?" she'd asked. To make the meat loaf, Cooper dumped the tubes of beef into the Ho- bart's bowl, then added ingredients one by one. The full recipe called for three hundred pounds of meat, seven and a half pounds of bread crumbs, three gallons of milk, ten pounds each of beaten eggs and Parmesan cheese, twenty pounds each of diced onions and shredded carrots, and nearly four pounds of garlic and spices. Cooper worked in batches, calculating the proportions as she went. She has al- THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 4,2006 73